Monday, August 11, 2014

The Pursuit of Happiness?

According to the Declaration of
Independence we are endowed with the inalienable rights to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government actions are thereby
delimited as well as government obligations defined. Governments may
do nothing to limit their citizens life, liberty and pursuit of
happiness. On the other hand governments must secure these rights as
far as possible. They must protect our lives and liberties and
safeguard our pursuits of happiness.

We do not often reflect about
what that means. I shall try to do that here. Our "inalienable
right to the pursuit of happiness" is not straightforward at
all; it raises questions we may find difficult to answer.

The right to pursue one's
happiness, we believe, implies that one is free to follow one's own
desires and ones own
beliefs about a good life. For
many of us that means that we should be able to marry whom we please.
No one else should be able to force us into marriages we do not want.
We should be free to follow occupations we choose for ourselves. No
one, whether family members or government agencies should be allowed
to choose for us what work we do.

We should each be able to shape
our daily lives as we consider best. This family says prayers before
and after every meal. In that other family everyone eats at different
times what ever they please. There is no private or public agency
that should be allowed to criticize the way of life we choose. It is
a task of the government to protect us against anyone who would
interfere with how we choose to pursue happiness.

So the government needs to
guarantee for us the freedom to choose life partners, to choose
occupations, to choose where we learn and what style of life seems
best to us.

No doubt questions come to your
mind as you read this. Some people choose lives that are clearly
destructive of the lives of their family members: they take drugs,
they drink too much, they lead a life of crime, they are violent and
coercive. Should someone not try
to stop them and protect their family?

The government's duty to
protect our pursuit of happiness is very unclear and full of
difficult decisions.

Are there other ways in which
we can expect our governments to protect our pursuit of happiness?

Children who are unable to go
to school are severely limited in their life choices. We therefore
restrict child labor and we believe that educational opportunities
should be available to everyone. (It is another matter that we do not
always act on that belief.) Ill health restrict life choices and many
of us believe that everyone is entitled to the best health care that
is available.

I have recently, purely by
accident, read several novels that describe in excruciating detail
the suffering war imposes on its victims. One novel describes the
terrible struggles against PTSD of a young woman Iraq war
veteran. Another follows
a German and a French child through the crucible of World War II. In
a third we hear of the brutality practiced by both sides in "The
Troubles" in Ireland. The experience of war, whether as a
soldier or a civilian, if we survive at all, leaves us overwhelmed by
our losses and consumed by fears and regrets, by guilt long after the
hostilities have ceased.

What future is ahead for the
children in Gaza who emerge from the shelters to find the streets
blocked by the rubble of their houses? Their parents, if they
survive, are consumed by grief and hatred. Their chances for choosing
a life they want are severely limited.

If it is true that one role of
government is to protect and foster our possibility to choose the
best life for ourselves, then governments surely may not engage in
the violence of war. Our government has fought a number of major wars
since the end of World War II. In each we sent massive troops and
airplanes into foreign countries. In each case the
wars ended with many
Americans dead and many veterans whose lives continue
to be seriously
afflicted. In each war
we left foreign
countries in ruins, we affected the genetics of the population that
survived so that after several generations their children remain
frequently afflicted
by terrible genetic diseases.

The wars we have fought left
masses of people whose lives will
never be freed from the burden of terrible loss, people would never
be able to feel completely safe again, people who would always
struggle with profound despair, with guilt and horror.

If all human beings have an
inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, if governments are to
protect that right, must governments not abstain from violence?

The temptation is to reject
this question as silly, to say that we needed to fight in Iraq and
Afghanistan, in Korea and Vietnam to protect ourselves and our
liberties. But before you soothe your conscience with that bromide,
think hard about the victims of war, both of the wars we have fought,
and the wars we have enabled by supplying military hardware to one or
both sides as happened in the conflict in Gaza. The cliché that
governments take refuge in, that they must wage war in order to
promote peace, is laughable. Governments have killed and plundered
for thousands of years in order to promote peace. So far that hasn't
worked. Why should it suddenly begin to work today?

If governments are to protect
our right to pursue happiness, they must dedicate themselves above
all to an end of all violence.